It's not 'if' but 'when' Australian organizations will tire of their trusty old PABXes and latch onto sexy new IP telephony according to the buzz around the convention rooms. And there's no doubt that stacked against goodies elsewhere on the information technology and telecommunication shopping list, IP telephony looks like a hot item.

It's just a pity for vendors of this stuff that many would-be customers remain wary of various hurdles and have scheduled the 'when' beyond 2004.

The first hurdle is the lack of a really solid cost justification for ditching a very useful old switchboard yet to reach the end of its economic life.

Other hurdles include the state of the in-situ data network, application integration, and personnel issues embedded in rival voice and data camps.

Bjarne Munch, senior research analyst, infrastructure strategies at Meta Group Inc. in Australia, sees all these hurdles throughout a highly fragmented market where readiness to adopt IP telephony is almost in inverse proportion to the size of company. Within this landscape are the large companies 'holding a little bit back' until they're sure that IP telephony is 'up to par' with the reliability of the PABX systems they would replace.

Leaping those hurdles are the 12 to 20 percent of organizations each year which replace old PABXes finally run into the ground, businesses consolidating systems after merger and acquisitions, those setting up in new offices, and government agencies where almost 14 percent of organizations already use IP telephony, says Landry Fevre, research program manager for telecommunications at IDC Australia.

Geoff Johnson, Gartner vice president and research director, networking and telecomms, Asia Pacific, sees a 'sweet spot' in the "immutable" PABX replacement market for 100- to 200-line (extension or handset) deployments. At this scale, based on IP telephony over LANs, Johnson reckons network performance can be 'closely controlled and supported' and the 'office politics surrounding adoption are usually not too outrageous'.

Gartner's Johnson see the cost hurdles in Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking infrastructure and offers the following rule of thumb: data networks between two and three years old will need about 30 to 50 percent of the equipment upgraded for successful voice over IP (VoIP). The upgrade rate rises to 80 to 100 percent of equipment for data networks more than five years old.

Munch is a cost-justification sceptic. He believes there's a group of large organizations sitting back and now finding IP telephony 'really hard' to cost justify compared to a couple of years ago when there were clear savings in international and STD tariffs. Tariff reductions have seen that argument harder to make.

IDC's Fevre reckons the MAC (moves, adds, changes) savings are undeniable for very large organizations which can have three or four full time employees dedicated to just moving people from one phone socket to another. But when many already have cost-effective relationships with PABX service providers, MAC savings (in labor and in the end user convenience) do not pack enough punch to break legacy PABX investment cycles.

Johnson adds that the total cost of ownership for VoIP

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine